Positive Deprivational Study

The world’s population is aging. Birth rates are increasing and death rates are decreasing causing the amount of people over 65 in the world to top 15%, with this predicted to rise to 25% by 2050 (Chand & Tung, 2014). As a result, it is more important than ever to ensure that as a global society we understand the emotional make up of our eldest members. Both positive and negative affect are well studied and supported measures of ones daily emotional experience, both by studying them independently as well as how they react to each other. Positive affect (PA) is to the extent to which individual’s experience feelings of alertness, joviality, determination, enthusiasm etc. Juxtaposing this, negative affect (NA) is the experience of feelings such
There is empirical evidence to say that negative effect as a single factor reduces with age and is quite low around late adulthood and early old age. Emotional stability appears to rise with age, peaking around late adulthood. (Charles , Reynolds , & Gatz, 2001). The evidence regarding positive affect is less clear-cut and definitive. Whilst some studies indicate that the prevalence of positive affect increases slightly with age (Gross et al., 1997), others report the the opposite relationship (Charles et al., 2001). These conflicting results are wide spread throughout the literature. Straying away from positive affect as a whole measure and looking at more specific feelings experienced by adults can shed some light onto this
It is well researched and documented that many cognitive abilities decline as age increases, especially in old age (Hülür et al,. 2015). Intriguing new research has linked iCorr scores of close to 0 (or less negative) with increased trajectories of cognitive decline, primarily in fluency and knowledge measures (Hülür, Hoppmann, Ram, & Gerstorf, 2015). What this essentially is saying is that as cognitive abilities begin to decline in old age, more positive, favourable and stable emotional experiences become more prevalent. This is in a sense an unexpected notion as you would expect good cognitive health to enhance emotional experience, however there is an evidence backed theorised monarchism that seems to give a fairly good explanation as to why this may be happening. According to Labouvie-Vief and Marquez (2004), affective processing relies heavily on crystallized cognitive abilities (fluency and language). As these cognitive abilities decline in old age, theoretically so to would the person’s ability to automatically process affective information, which leads to a less negative iCorr. The evidence presented by Hülür et al. (2015) is very strong in support of this phenomenon. However, it could be argued that the correlation between cognitive decline and emotional experience could be simply caused by the